DEFENCE OR MURDER? November 20, 2012

The military forces of Israel are again attacking the Palestinians who live in Gaza, a large proportion of whom are children and claiming it is defence. Certain persons, including those who are public officials, are parroting this line.
So what is the factual situation? At Truthdig, Chris Hedges writes:

Because it has the power to do so, Israel—as does the United States—flouts international law to keep a subject population in misery. The continued presence of Israeli occupation forces defies nearly a hundred U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for them to withdraw. The Israeli blockade of Gaza, established in June 2007, is a brutal form of collective punishment that violates Article 33 of the Fourth 1949 Geneva Convention, which set up rules for the “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.” The blockade has turned Gaza into a sliver of hell, an Israeli-administered ghetto where thousands have died, including the 1,400 civilians killed in the Israeli incursion of 2008. With 95 percent of factories shut down, Palestinian industry has virtually ceased functioning. The remaining 5 percent operate at 25 to 50 percent capacity. Even the fishing industry is moribund. Israel refuses to let fishermen travel more than three miles from the coastline, and within the fishing zone boats frequently come under Israeli fire. The Israeli border patrols have seized 35 percent of the agricultural land in Gaza for a buffer zone. The collapsing infrastructure and Israeli seizure of aquifers mean that in many refugee camps, such as Khan Yunis, there is no running water. UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) estimates that 80 percent of all Gazans now rely on food aid. And the claim of Israeli self-defense belies the fact that it is Israel that maintains an illegal occupation and violates international law by carrying out collective punishment of Palestinians. It is Israel that chose to escalate the violence when during an incursion into Gaza earlier this month its forces fatally shot a 13-year-old boy. As the world breaks down, this becomes the new paradigm—modern warlords awash in terrifying technologies and weapons murdering whole peoples. We do the same in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s kind of amazing and inspiring to see people managing somehow to survive in—as essentially caged animals and subject to constant, random, sadistic punishment only to humiliate them, no pretext. They’re—Israel and the United States keep them alive, basically. They don’t want them to starve to death. But the life is set up so that you can’t have a dignified, decent life. In fact, one of the words you hear most often is “dignity.” They would like to have dignified lives. And the standard Israeli position is they shouldn’t raise their heads. And it’s a pressure cooker, could blow up. You know, people can’t live like that forever.

AMY GOODMAN: You described it in a piece you wrote as an “open-air prison.”

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s an open-air prison. As soon as you—you know, we’ve all been in jail for civil disobedience and so on. The overwhelming feeling everyone gets is somebody else is in total control of you. There’s an arbitrary authority who can control anything you do. Stand up, sit down, you know, find something to eat, go to the bathroom—whatever it may be, they all determine it; you can’t do anything. Now that’s basically what it’s like living there. And, you know, there’s—people find ways to adapt, but it’s just a constant—it’s constant subjugation to an external force, which has no purpose except to humiliate you. Of course, they have pretexts—everybody has pretexts—but they don’t make any sense.

Then again it might be useful to reflect on the history of the Palestine. Miko Peled is the son an Israeli General:

The United Nations is ineffective because the Security Council is a historical relic and gives permanent members the veto power. There needs to be an automatic process of investigation, and if warranted indictments and trials, whenever any such incident transgresses International Humanitarian Law occurs. Governments, including the United States and Israel, should be brought to account. Criminal behavior should no longer be given sanction. The problem is that the criminals are running things.

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The war criminals are the Hamas terrorists who are firing hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilians.
Now that Israel is targeting these Islamo fascists, the radical left is upset.
Everyone knows Hamas fires behind civilians.

Hamas stores its missiles near schools and mosques in Gaza. They fire these missles out of residential areas, so civilians are killed.
Golda Meir 40 years ago talked about this Arab child abuse.
Even Falk should be horrified by these Islamo fascists.

Why does Hamas and Islamic Jihad fire rockets from a school at Israel praying that Israel return fire and kill some of it’s children. Thats Gaza today. The Palestinians are the only people in the world﻿ that go out day by day figuring ways to get their children to die in front of the world press.

How awful! It’s a shame that Hamas thinks of their children as weapons instead of as human beings.

Not a single Gazan would be killed or injured if Hamas and Islamic Jihad would firing rockets at Israel
Its that Simple. There is nothing else to talk about.
As long as Hamas continues their terrorist attacks, ofcourse Israel is going to defend themselves.

The fundamental problem, as it always, or at least mostly, is the recourse to violence that begins before the overt violence. Dispossession, which has its origin in the formation of the Israeli state, sanctioned by Imperialism, which is the point of the video. Israel is also a racist state, expressed against Arab people in general and Palestinians in particular, but also the failure, I would say, to repatriate the Ethiopian Jews.

Israel, despite it nuclear weapons and other armaments, has two possibilities: A two-state or a unitary, multi-cultural state, in which the Jewish people would be a minority. The later is unthinkable for those who frame Israelis policy, which has become increasing right wing and more extreme with the influx of the immigrants from the Soviet Union. I guess Greater Israel makes sense from their point of view, with the current episode in Gaza as part of the scheme.

The puzzle is, why the Israel Project gets support from the West in general and Australia, for example, in particular. My suggestion is that there is a lack of long term strategic thinking and vision, with policies determined by the short term political cycle, and what are perceived to be critical demographics, as is evidenced by the reaction to refugees. There is an absence of an expressed global strategic vision, which the management of climate change will require along with human and ecological coexistence.

Such a proposal will represent a paradigm shift, an existential threat to Israel and to the national states in general as presently framed in violence. Of course the alternative is extinction for humanity. Egotism carries a high price.